Before CfA, I served as a web developer and online strategist for a variety of nonprofit organizations, libraries, and open source software communities. I'm helping the City of Santa Cruz, CA implement an open data portal to serve as a central repository for municipal data, information, and applications.

So your city has deployed a shiny new data catalog as part of your new open data initiative…now what?! Cities produce a great deal of data, all of which is probably interesting to *somebody* out there. Given our limited municipal …

In May of this year, Code for America began accepting applications for our new Accelerator civic startup incubator program, designed to help startup ventures in the civic space. As my colleague Abhi Nemani mentioned in a recent blog post, the …

As a Code for America Fellow, as an open data advocate, and as a civic hacker, I was thrilled to read the new Digital Government Strategy that was released by the White House last week. This plan sets out practical …

Like many of you, I use the Google Maps application on my smartphone, a lot. Whether I need to locate the nearest convenience store or find the closest BART stop, having a map in my hand with a realtime “you …

As a technology consultant in the nonprofit sector for 10 years, I’ve helped a lot of organizations select and adopt technology platforms and software titles — everything from simple desktop widgets up to full-blown operational database implementations. When I was …

As organizations like Code for America encourage government transparency and the concept of Open Data at multiple levels of government in the US, I think it’s useful for us to take a look at how Open Data is handled in …

As one of three Code for America Fellows working with the City of Santa Cruz, I was fortunate to spend five weeks in this beautiful city learning about the people, businesses, organizations, and institutions that make it such a great …